Signs you need intelligent business technology

Every growing business hits a point where certain parts of the business become painful.  Depending what sector you’re in, these problems become evident extremely quickly, or they just creep slowly, until one day you realize it’s not going to work.  Why don’t they work?  Because you’re not using your own data to help you.

• Repetitive tasks prone to human error or forgetfulness
• No easy way to scale what you’re currently doing.
• No big picture view into your business which equals no insight to make impacting decisions
• Have a CRM, but poorly used, or used too much
• From a business operation standpoint…. when things like these get painful.  Here’s the outcome
  • Most employees feel scattered, never really hitting their groove, and always playing catch up
  • Higher turnover
  • Staff is frustrated
  • Service/Product delivery issues
  • Customer service issues are dropped through the cracks

• Run business through Email, Calendar, Phone and Accounting System
  Unfortunately, too many business operate this way.  It’s great when you’re small and not too many employees, and have a steady workload.  It starts to feel painful when trying to scale up and out however.  More employees are hired, more sales are made, large projects are underway and there’s just no good way to manage everything.  They’ll typically bounce around trying app to app never really settling on something.  Then someone in management will say “we’ve tried a ton of sites and applications, and none fit us.”  This is followed by “we need something custom and that costs way too much”, or they’ll continue what they’ve been doing.
• The Notes/Details/Other Field is where you put every single bit of specific info.
  Take applications like Act!  Back in the day, it used to generally run the show and dominated the market  for CRM products.  Today, it can’t keep up with the market and no one typically uses Act! anymore, unless they just haven’t migrated away from it.  Now imagine running a service based business from within ACT and trying to manage your scheduling, project and task management, and operations with it.  It’s just not made to do this.  This is however, how many businesses choose to operate.

Even at their best, CRMs typically don’t manage anything outside of sales.